branch page has confusing UI for incoming/outgoing merge proposals

[Karl Fogel]

On a branch page (e.g., https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~kfogel/pydev/trunk), the UI around incoming and outgoing merge proposals is confusing in the following way:

Near the top of the page, right above where it says "Propose for merging into another branch", are these two lines:

   « 1 branch proposed for merging into this one.
   » Not proposed for merging

(The text "1 branch" links to https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~kfogel/pydev/trunk/+merges).

To the reader, it seems like these two lines contradict each other. The first says there's one branch proposed for merging, the other appears to say no branch is proposed for merging :-). After thinking about it, I realized that the second line probably refers to outgoing merges -- that is, proposed merges of "this" branch (the one for which this is the branch page) into other branches. Maybe the arrows pointing right and left are meant to indicate this too, but their meaning is obscure.

There are many ways to fix this through better wording and maybe different visual arrangement, so I won't try to come up with them all here. Just wanted to let you know that the current UI baffled me for a bit.

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

I tried to add the "ui" tag to this, but got a warning that that tag had never been used for "launchpad" itself. That hints to me that there's some other project/component I should have filed this under...

I actually tried to look for a more appropriate (i.e., less general) project when I filed it, but unfortunately when you do a search on projects while reporting a bug, there's no way to search just on the project names -- that is, if I searched for "launchpad", a zillion results still come up, I guess including every project that has the word "launchpad" in its description. Similar result even when I searched for "launchpad-". (Maybe should have tried "lp"?)

Anyway, I run into this problem all the time: when filing a bug about Launchpad, there's no practical way to find the right project name to file it under. You just have to know the candidates by heart.

Is there already a bug report for this problem? :-) I looked, but didn't find one.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The root cause of the bug-reporting problem is that Launchpad's bug tags are unwieldy (see especially bug 81575, bug 83736, bug 98585, bug 151129, and bug 203585). Launchpad developers have worked around this by using dozens of "projects" (e.g. launchpad-bazaar, which this bug belongs to) instead of tags. This misuse of projects causes duplicate bug detection to fail when reporting bugs, which in turn means the QA team spends more time marking duplicates. As you've discovered, it also causes Launchpad to whine about tags that have been used in other Launchpad "projects" but not in the one you're filing in.

The problem with the branch page is partly my fault: my 2.0 mockup happened to show "» On hold for merging into _bzr.dev_", and therefore did not show what the text should be for the case where a branch is not proposed for merging into any others. I suggest "» This branch is not proposed for merging into any others."

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

I like your proposed wording for branches that are not proposed for merging anywhere.

Thanks for the thorough analysis on the bug-reporting problem; at least I understand the history behind it now.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Nice easy bug :)